


Disapprobation

by HankTalking



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Crossfaction, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Sloppy Makeouts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:09:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28040673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HankTalking/pseuds/HankTalking
Summary: n.Moral disapproval; condemnation.Tavish’s life has a lot of shouldn’ts
Relationships: Demoman/Soldier (Team Fortress 2)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 54





	Disapprobation

Tavish’s life has a lot of shouldn’ts

For instance, he really shouldn’t be risking life and limb to meet up and have drinks with some barmy American he met at a projectile weapons convention. He shouldn’t be breaching contract over a bloke who’s got so many screws loose he could open up a hardware store, shouldn’t be sneaking around when the best case scenario is a few good laughs and the worst case scenario is losing a multi-million dollar salary.

He shouldn’t keep his lunch in the same place he keeps his potassium chloride. He shouldn’t drink so much, but he’s heard that one so many times anyway it’s hard to pay attention to. The voice of self-preservation is constant and buzzing, putting a churning in his gut, reminding him that he could be making friends with folks who _aren’t_ a walking death sentence. He shouldn’t be going out for ribs. He shouldn’t be accepting invites to Las Vegas for the furlough.

He _definitely_ shouldn’t be pressed into the mattress, another man’s tongue in his mouth.

The hotel bed creaks as Jane kisses him harder, and he thinks, oh god he wishes he could just not think. Their bodies are hot pressed against each other, their fancy jackets gone for the evening as they’re down to their undershirts as insubstantial barriers between skin on skin. Jane is heavy on top of him, and he shouldn’t like how that feels, to be held down while he and his best friend suck the air out of each other’s lungs. Jane has each of his wrists pinned to the sheets, and he shouldn’t like that either, how Jane’s taken control, how Tavish is slowly letting himself come undone.

There’s this _plop_ at the loss of suction as Jane lifts his lips off Tavish’s and onto the Demoman’s neck, whisper-hissing, begging, _praying_ , “Tav, Tavish. Oh god Tav.”

It’s slippery where time is now and where it was minutes ago before he was like this, before he was craving Jane's everything. It happened because they were laughing or maybe fighting or maybe…no they just tripped. They tripped and Jane landed on Tavish, and it wasn’t different at first. It just knocked the wind out of him. It wasn’t until Jane was chuckling and trying to push himself up that they had stopped, that they’d locked eyes and Jane’s smile had slowly fallen away, a mask lifted to something underneath. It was _hunger_ , small and fiery at first when Jane’s eyes openly raked Tavish’s body, not disguising the fact as they took in his state of undress since—unlike Jane—Tavish had been successful at getting out of his dress pants. The hunger had grown hotter, burned brighter, a bonfire as someone kept shoveling more on, and Tavish drank in being looked at like a dying man in the desert. He’d never been desired like that, not in his entire life, and when Jane finished his tour of Tavish’s body he couldn’t suppress the hitch in his breath when their eyes finally met again.

He’d swallowed when Jane leaned closer. He’d closed his eye as Jane had pressed that first, tentative kiss against him.

Now his back arches, shoving his stomach up into the human canopy above him. His nipples are hard and he didn’t know they were so damn _sensitive_ until they scrape against the solid plane of Jane’s chest and he whimpers. He shouldn’t be doing that either. He’s a damn mercenary, a _Demoman_ , and he shouldn’t...

“God Tavish,” Jane’s muttering in his mouth in-between rough kisses. “I fucking. I love you. Want you so damn bad.”

And Jane must be a fucking mind reader because those words are a switch in Tavish’s brain. He can’t censor the moan that comes out of him, no matter how weak, how pathetic he sounds as his hips jerk upwards. Jane is moving his arms, and it takes him a second to notice that Jane is taking time to pin down both his hands with one of his own, and his free one now slides down until it can toy with the edge of Tavish’s undershirt.

“Jane…”

It’s the only thing he’s said in ages. He shouldn’t be saying anything at all, let alone confessing what’s coursing through his system, revealing how _I want you_ isn’t quite right but _I want you to want me_ is just so damn conceited. So the only thing he can do is breathe Jane’s name in a plea.

The roaming hand snakes up under his tank, the pretense of attire gone as the too-cold fingers press against unbearably hot flesh. Jane further displays his mind reading powers tweaking Tavish’s nipple with his thumb, clawing out another gurgle from the Demoman.

It’s so dangerously similar now, edging so close to fear, the shouldn’ts piling in his head as his breath increases. He tries to lift his arms and can’t. He tries clear his mind and can’t. He tries to make his voice behave where his body will not-

Jane’s knee begins to shove his thighs open.

“Jane,” he yelps, only this time he says it in panic as his eye snaps open and he jerks upward. “Shit Jane- shit we need to stop. We’ll- _shit_.”

Jane freezes. The constriction around Tavish’s wrists lessons, and then disappears entirely and Jane rears back onto his haunches. Tavish wriggles until he’s against the headboard, panting heavily.

“Holy shit,” he coughs.

“You alright Tav?” Jane is looking sideways at him, but not in the way Tavish is expecting. The expression on his face is inscrutable.

“No. No! Of course not, we almost just-” The ghost of Jane’s body is on him, the memory of seconds ago where his hand was so close to Tavish’s waistband. He tries to shake it away. “If I hadn’t said something just now, we would have both crossed some damn lines.”

“Uh. Yeah. Probably.”

Tavish looks up and is bludgeoned upside the head with understanding. He realizes why Jane’s expression is so damn weird: he’s not ashamed. He’s not ashamed in the slightest.

“Jane,” Tavish says cautiously. “You know why we can’t do this, right?”

 _This_ when they’re still half-undressed on the bed together, breathless and sweating and the only thing keeping them back is Tavish’s self control. No one else’s. He’s alone at the wheel and Jane’s only refraining out of personal respect, not any sense of how screwed they are.

Jane squints at him. Thinking hard, peering deep into the soul he sometimes claims a RED can’t have, (and at the next drunken moment declaring that if it existed, it would be the purest, bravest soul in the damn world.) “Because you are…no longer in the mood?”

“Because we’re in enough trouble as it is!” Tavish throws up his hands. “Do you know how bloody condemned we are? Already RED and BLU can catch wind of us at any moment, I can’t go into half the places you can in this blasted country, and we want to add _shagging each other in our Vegas hotel room_ to that bloody list?”

Jane’s forehead wrinkles, his features that Tavish has only ever seen go soft in the past few minutes now toughening up again. “Were you not…wanting that?”

“Fuck, Jane of course I _wanted_ it,” the admission falls out too quickly. Too late to grab back and saying it aloud is its own line crossed. Having already failed to keep it packed down, he tries to at least get to his point. “I just shouldn’t.”

Jane stares at him blankly.

“Right. Of course.” Tavish presses the heel of his palm against his forehead. “Look at who I’m talking to here. Man who’s never suppressed an impulsive urge in his life.”

“It is not an _impulse_ Tav.” Jane almost sounds…offended. Or something like it, as though he's irritated he has to make such an obvious correction. “It’s not an impulse if I’ve thought about doing it nearly every day since I’ve met you.”

That desire, that hunger Tavish had seen. He knows Jane has looked at him before, can now recognize it for what it was, those eyes flickering at him sometimes with the smolder beneath. It feels unwarranted. _He_ feels undeserving, that Jane has been fancying him for months, and he diverts, “if that’s what you want, there’s a lot better sheep in the field.”

Jane narrows his eyes. “Gross.”

“Ach it’s an _expression-_ ” Tavish huffs. “Look, if men are to your tastes, you can find a hookup that’s a lot less dangerous. You don’t have to lower your standards just because I’m… _around_.”

“My tastes?” Jane scoffs. “What do you know about my tastes, DeGroot? Every time we go to the pier, you get me the wrong flavor of ice cream—even when I tell you _exactly_ what kind to get.”

“I told you lad, they were out of ro-”

“My _tastes_ ,” Jane carries on like a panicking horse carriage barreling down the road, arriving on Tavish as he stands there stock still in fear, “are rocky road and handsome Scotsmen. So you can take _that_ to the bank and sign it.” Jane crosses his arms.

A new, cool feeling runs down Tavish’s spine, the freezer-burn of fluster. “Jane,” he groans, running his hands over his scalp, craning his neck backwards until Jane finally falls out of his vision. “You’re not making this any easier.”

“I don’t understand why it’s _can’t_ be easy. I love you. You, uh…” Jane trails off. “Like me. I think.”

Not since they stopped groping each other has Tavish wanted to touch him this bad, to assure him that he wants what Jane had given him, wants his hands, his mouth, to feel him again-

Tavish lets out a strangled cough, hard minutes of trying to cool off down the drain. Jane notices his state, the dilatation in his eye, and that only adds to his embarrassment. “Ach, please Jane. It’s not that simple. I just need you to listen, just a few minutes.”

“Fine. I will listen. But then you have to listen while I tell you what _I_ think.”

Tavish allows it. He starts, “doing...” He waves his hand, disturbing the humid air between their still cooling bodies. “ _This_ , would be risky. More dangerous than anything we’ve ever done.”

“Un. Like. Ly,” Jane scoffs. “We’ve been sneaking around for ages by this point, and we’re damn good at it. Face it maggot, you didn’t want retreat with your tail between your legs until sloppy makeouts came into the picture.”

Tavish folds his arms. “I was thinking about it before then too. That we should break it off.”

“ _Ah bub bub bub!_ ” Jane points out gleefully.

“It’s ‘bup bup bup’.”

“Quiet. You thought about it, but you didn’t actually do anything. So what is it Tavish? What’s the difference between then and now?”

An awkward silence hangs between them.

“…C’mon lad, don’t make me say it.” Tavish tries to look away, but he can still feel the solar rays of Jane’s glare socking him in the jaw. “Ach, it’s- what we got here isn’t right Jane. It’s not a natural thing for a pair of mates to do.”

“Ha! Natural?” Jane laughs. “I don’t buy that ‘natural’ crap from hippies and I certainly don’t buy it from you. I do not care about how _natural_ the devil’s lettuce is! I do not care how much _natural_ they cram into those granola bars, or how much fiber will help my bowel movements! Natural is for suckers.”

Tavish stares at him, long and hard, and finally, finally something small and brittle inside him crumbles away just enough that he’s hit with a weak chuckle. “You know, sometimes I don’t know how crazy you really are, and how much is just insight disguised as malarkey.”

“Good,” Jane smirks. “Keep it that way.”

“But still we need to-” Tavish rubbed his eye. “We need to think about this. It feels like I’m the only one here who’s trying to keep us both from getting killed.”

“Why?”

“Well someone has to, and it certainly isn’t going to be you.”

“ _Why?_ ” Jane is angry now. “Why does one of us have to be holding the goddamn reigns? I didn’t ask you for ribs because I thought you would keep me back, I asked you for ribs because _you broke that cop’s back_ and _it was the most glorious display of patriotic strength I have ever seen!_ ”

“Patriotism for where, exactly?” Tavish asks tiredly.

“You damn know well where. Don’t ask stupid questions.”

So Tavish doesn’t deign him with anything, just sits there massaging his head. He knows his rationality is eroding. That Jane is sitting here chipping away with his donkey’s indifference, his stupid, (literally) hardheaded attitude that Tavish can’t just turn away from.

“So,” Jane says. “I listened. Now you listen.”

“I barely got a word in edgewise,” Tavish complains.

“And they were all bad words. Now,” Jane sits crosslegged, stripped in the half-light coming in from the window, painting him radiant. “It’s clear you have some hangups about your latent bisexuality.”

Tavish puts all the power of a two-eyed stare out the focus of his singular optic, hoping the pure concentration gets his disdain though.

Jane carries on. “It is nothing to be ashamed about.”

“Easier for you to say, you weren’t the one who was-” Tavish finds his enthusiasm for that sentence die immediately. “ _You know_.” He substitutes with a hand motion.

“Oh,” Jane blinks. “Is that a problem?”

“That’s not it exactly, I just shouldn’t have wanted…shouldn’t have even let myself be…”

“You and your damn shouldn’ts,” Jane frowns.

The frustration, the embarrassment, all the waves of different emotions Tavish has been put though are washed away in the new torrent of shame. “Ah _fuck_.”

“Tavish,” Jane says sternly as Tavish begins to clutch his head. “I have been dying to put you in a supportive yet comforting hug for the past twenty minutes. Permission to embrace you?”

Fuck he could use a hug right now. He could use Jane right now. He nods.

He leans in to the enveloping warmth as Jane holds him in a touch that is scored all different than before, yet the same strange intimacy he’s starting to suspect relates to what Jane said before that knee-shaking _I want you so damn bad_. That he didn't say that in the heat of the moment or because he feels sorry for the sad Cyclops that happens to be his friend, but because he genuinely wants this as much as Tavish does.

Oh god does Tavish want this.

“Tav, has that stupid voice in the back of your head telling you not to do things ever made you happy?” Jane asks the back wall over Tavish’s shoulder.

“Kept me safe,” Tavish sighs.

“That’s not what I asked, private,” Jane reiterates. “Has it made you happy? Has it ever actually helped you find the man you’re supposed to be?”

Tavish thinks long and hard, bringing his hands up run shaky fingers through Jane’s hair. “No,” he admits. “I don’t think it has. You?”

“Me? I crushed that voice years ago under the heel of my American-made double buckle combat boots. Like a goddamn ant.”

Tavish snorts. “Figures.”

They stay like that, holding each other, for a long time. They stay like that until the neon pizza sign across the street winks off, until the digital clocks on the matching nightstands read long past 4am.

“I don’t know what to do about this,” Tavish admits finally.

“Fair. Even if you did, I wouldn’t listen. You’ve changed your mind so many goddamn times tonight I’d tell you you’d have to sleep on it first before I believed you.”

“I have _not_ ,” Tavish laughs. “Just…there’s a lot. And I’m scared. I’m scared every day RED or BLU’ll find out and we’ll be…” He sighs. “I guess it wouldn’t matter at that point if we were friends or…anything else. We’d be dead either way.”

“That’s the spirit!”

Tavish leans back and finds it in him to grin at this stupid, crazy, _reckless_ man that is certainly going to get them both killed. No, no he’s not going to think like that anymore. They’re in this together, and they’d share the blame just as much as they shared each other.

He squeezes both hands to the side of Jane’s face and says, “I love you too, you crazy, crazy Soldier.”

It’s worth it to see the light flare up in Jane’s eyes, the dopey grin that springs to his face. “Well, then that makes you just as crazy as me.”

“Aye, I suppose it does.” He presses his forehead to Jane’s. “We’re already doing a spicy shimmy on what’s taboo and what isn’t. I suppose we shouldn’t give a damn what’s considered crazy.”

Jane’s face is so beautiful, the only shame being how long _shouldn’t_ has kept that realization at bay. But Tavish quashes it, watching as a new question forms in Jane’s brow.

“I know I told you to sleep on it but,” Jane bites his lip. “Can I stay here? While you do that.”

Tavish likes Jane's warmth against him. He likes him here, where their atoms are pressing out against each other in the closest the universe can approximate as touch.

“Aye. Come here.”

They lay down on Tavish’s bed, and Jane rolls around until he’s nestled in Tavish’s arms. As their breathing slows, in sync then out of sync then back again, Jane says, “even if you weren’t freaking out, it’s a good thing you stopped us when you did. We don’t exactly have any condoms.”

Tavish’s jaw locks, and he quickly scoots his pelvis back a few inches. “You’re doing that on purpose,” he snarls into the nape flush with his nose.

“Maybe. I’m craaaaazy, remember.”

Tavish hates him, and loves him more in that moment than he ever has. If this is the night where he’s cut everything off, where he’s chosen this Soldier over the world’s approval, then so be it. He makes a little mental image of an ant, and steps down.

**Author's Note:**

> sort of a response to “tavish is the responsible one in their relationship” sentiments. I think you can tell a lot about a tf2 fan by where they put demo on the “merc sanity scale” lmao, not that that’s a bad thing! just this time I sort of wanted to apply the meta narrative that demo is the down to earth family man who thinks about consequences of his actions and apply it to an in-universe character study where his natural state of being is brash and impulsive but the weight of familial/social expectations is holding him back from his true self
> 
> gah I really want 2 write *true* p0rn at some point but I just get so self conscious when I’m done I can almost never can go back and not cringe at what I’ve written


End file.
